"It Seems Queer": The Censorship of Her Wedding Night

"It Seems Queer": The Censorship of Her Wedding Night CHRISTINA HAUCK 1 "[Hlowever vile. however filthy. however degrading .... vice so long as it is presented in terms of the strong man's over-sexuality and the frail woman's yielding to his dominance. is approved. unthinkingly accepted and consequently is not banned. When. however ... you have a plot which depends not on the over-sexuality, but on the under-sexuality of a man ... the play is considered improper and is banned!'" So British sexologist. birth controller. social commentator and historian, translator, poet, novelist, and playwright Marie Cannichael Stopes assesses the Lord Chamberlain's refusal. in t923 and 1924. to license for public perfonnance her autobiographical play. Vecria .3 Ultimately attributing the censorship of her play to men's refusal even to consider a woman's point of view, Stopes asks, "how many other serious plays by women have been destroyed before ever they came into being?'" Her question is not merely rhetorical; it is literally unanswerable. Yet recent feminist excavations of the rich and vast body of work by women do confirm that women 's writing has been subjected to various forms of censorship. including . most insidiously. that of critical neglect.s This paper will contribute to the project of recovering lost texts by women through a discussion of an unpublished one-act play. Her Wedding Night (t917). by a previously undiscovered woman playwright, Florence Bates.6 This account of the circumstances surrounding . and the justification for. the post-production censorship of this oneact comedy in August t9t7 not only supports Stopes's claim that the Lord Chamberlain's office banned representations of male sexual inadequacy as a matter of principle. but also deepens our understanding of the meaning of "sexual impropriety" as understood by the Lord Chamberlain and adds an important new dimension to studies in British stage censorship. The plot of Her Wedding Night is very simple. It's their wedding night. and Peter and Laura have motored down from London in Peter's new car. As the play opens. the Waiter is showing the couple Laura's room in a large SalisModern Drama. 41 (1998) 546 The Censorship of Her Wedding Night 547 bury Hotel, while the Chambennaid looks on. In contrast to Laura, who is tender and loving, Peter is hungry and tired and more than a little nervous, babbling incessantly about his car. " It seems queer to have you and the - car, everything together. 1 think she's a beauty, don't you, Laura?"7 In fact, he talks so much about his car that it begins to seem his affectional preferences lie with "her" rather than with Laura. Peter is so "completely dazzled by" the car that, despite his proclaimed exhaustion, he escapes the bridal bower three times, managing to spend most of the evening offstage in the garage. At this point in the play, the late twentieth-century reader, sensitized to the sometimes subtle eruptions of "queer" sexuality, begins to question whether the car is the primary attraction: during his first excursion to the garage, Peter meets another man, "Badger," who is also on his honeymoon, and Peter and Badger rendezvous during each of Peter's subsequent trips. Meanwhile, Laura has a long, fairly intimate convcrsation with the Chambcnnaid, which, more than anything Peter can sayar do, helps Laura to adjust to the decidedly nonromantic atmosphere of "her wedding night." The play ends with Laura scrubbing engine oil from Peter's face and hands, while he concedes that "hav[ing) a missus" is "[m)uch nicer" than having a car (26). The "plot" of the licensing and post-production censorship of Her Wedding Night is somewhat more complex. Calling it "a hannless farce.... Tasteless ... but sufficiently free from impropriety," Examiner Ernest Bendall "reluctantly Recommended [it) for licence" on 9 June 1917' The Lord Chamberlain concurred , but only on the condition that certain unspecified changes be made to the script.9 Judging by later correspondence between the Lord Chamberlain and Charles Hawtrey, the play's manager and male lead, the Lord Chamberlain also extracted Hawtrey's promise not to sublet the production, apparently because he trusted Hawtrey to stage this "tasteless" little farce tastefully...